Books I'm Currently Reading

From about 1980 until 2005 when I left the Washington, DC, area, one man more or less controlled my reading. For much of that time Michael Dirda wrote a chatty book column in the Washington Post's book review section and so skilled is he at describing books in must-read terms ("lip-smacking narrative gusto," "rumbustious," "one of the world's masterpieces") that just about every week I put on reserve at the library or bought at least one of the books he mentioned in his column. When his books began to be published it was all over with me and my TBR list.

I knew Dirda was a Sherlock Holmes afficianado but until this new book, On Conan Doyle, came my way a couple of days ago I didn't realize quite how deep into that world he was embedded. He is an invested member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and because that makes him eligible, also a member of the Half-Pay Club of DC. Like so many of us he discovered Sherlock Holmes in his early youth (he was 10, I was 14) and he strings his comments on his growing interest in the author over the years. He discusses Holmes, the many other books Conan Doyle wrote, and eventually the companionship of the BSI.

As is well known, Conan Doyle considered his Sherlock Holmes stories ephemera and put his heart into The White Company, his nonfiction, and the many other genres in which he wrote. Dirda has read them all and finds these other books worthy, most of them, and since this is a book about the author and not the character, he describes the joy he took in reading many of these other books and encourages the reader to try them.

Dirda particularly recommends two novels about a Napoleonic soldier, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (1896) and The Adventures of Gerard (1903.) He quotes George MacDonald Fraser: "a splendid catalog of secret missions, escapes, love affairs, duels, disguises, pursuits, triumphs, and occasional disasters," and adds that they "clearly helped inspire Fraser's own brilliant historical novels about Harry Flashman, but unlike that irrepressible Victorian cad and coward, Etienne Gerard is one of the most endearing and honorable figures in all of literature."

In a chapter called "Steel True, Blade Straight," which is carved on Conan Doyle tombstone, Dirda describes the author's passion for honor, justice, and common sense. Conan Doyle "attacks journalistic improprieties, proudly serves as the president of the Divorce Law Reform Union, argues for the adoption of body armor for soldiers, warns against the imminent threat of submarine warfare, advocates life-preserving 'neck-collars' for sailors, envisions the benefits of a Channel tunnel, and promotes the cause of Spiritualism." Dirda finds his science fiction well worth reading as well as his historical novels.

Conan Doyle was of the stoic school: "That is one of the weaknesses of modern life. We complain too much. We are not ashamed of complaining." He met and admired Oscar Wilde and was amused by his brother-in-law, E V Hornung, the creator of Raffles, the gentleman-thief. He almost named his famous character Sherringford Hope and his companion Ormond Sacker.

Some other tidbits from the book: Nero Wolfe is thought by some to be the son of Irene Adler and Myroft Holmes, Sherlock's brother, who is also thought by some to have been the original M of British intelligence. He points out that T S Eliot stole almost entire the Musgrave Ritual Q&A for "Murder in the Cathedral": "Who shall have it?" "He who will come," etc, and he modeled Macavity, the Mystery Cat," aka The Hidden Paw, after Professor Moriarty.

There is much, much more in this little book, and I encourage you to mine the rest of the gems yourself.

"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination." (Elizabeth Hardwick)

In his introduction to Frans G Bengtsson's The Long Ships Michael Chabon has this to say about the novel:

In my career as a reader I have encountered only three people who knew The Long Ships, and all three of them, like me, loved it immoderately. Four for four: from this tiny but irrefutable sample I dare to extrapolate that this novel, first published in Sweden during the Second World War, stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.

Let me make that five out of five. I am immoderately excited about this novel, a story in a genre that I never, ever read - slam, bang adventure, war, sea stories taking place in the 9th century. But this tale about a red-haired Dane called Orm, who accidentally goes off on an adventure with a ship full of Vikings and comes home a hero is irresistible.

Red Orm is kidnapped and becomes one of the adventurers in an open boat that heads for the south coast of England to rape and pillage. They pick up a slave from some other adventures who don't want him because he won't eat pork and refuses to row on Saturdays. He turns out to be a Jew from Spain, which had not too long before been conquered by the Moors. He is a wealthy goldsmith, who directs them to Cordova, where they are themselves enslaved by the caliph.

Orm is a sensitive lad, at least by Viking terms, and a bit of a hypochondriac. He gets nervous when the slave next to him on the rowing bench has a cough. There is an adventure a minute in this book and before you know it Orm and his friends have stolen a bell from Santiago de Compostella, summered with some monks in County Cork, and offered the bell as a gift to King Harald Bluetooth.

There are other adventures, sword fights, a bit of wooing, and a trip to the Black Sea, all moving along at a brisk clip. The book is surprisingly entertaining in many ways, not least of which is the dry, understated wit of the author as he regards the world the Danes look on as normal and we look on with horror. His religious characters are a delight, especially the poor monks who are trying to convert these warriers to Christianity while they continue to attribute their luck or lack of it to the old gods.

This book stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to almost any reader. It has done so for me.

In her 20s and still finding her way to a comfortable style, Georgette Heyer wrote four books set in the 20th century that she later asked her publishers to repress. They were allowed to go out of print and have never been republished except now by print-on-demand.

One of the reasons she didn't want these books available to the public is their semi-autobiographical quality and the most intensely personal of these books is Helen, published in 1928. It is the story of a girl orphaned at birth who is brought up by her father. The bond between them is intense but both are unusually self-contained and do not tolerate the expression of strong feeling. They do not engage either in small talk or the normal hypocracy that smooths life for most of us. The girl and her father are very happy at their country estate, riding their beloved horses, and with loving friends and neighbors and much intellectual conversation. Lots of books.

The first half of this book is superb, five stars by almost any criteria, with insight into the characters and a steadily clicking plot as Helen learns from an unusually clever governess as she reaches her teenage years. Then comes the Great War when Helen loses her beloved horses, then her father - he enlists and is sent to a headquarters job in France. He is "perfectly safe" behind the lines, but of course no one is perfectly safe in war and this is a parting that is difficult for Helen to accept. She signs up with a neighbor to nurse wounded soldiers in London.

Helen had a handful of suitors in the pre-war years but she was uniniterested in professions of love and proposals of marriage. She was friends with a few of them, young men whom she loved but was not in love with, and it was another wrench when they went off to war. My favorite of these suitors was killed in the war as were other characters who were close to Helen and her father.

After the war Helen is caught up in the roaring 20s, makeup, short skirts, drinking (legal in England), partying until dawn. She hung out with, but did not become part of, the Bohemian set, witty people who were examining every aspect of traditional life as they tried to recover from the war.

It is this post-war part of the story that is, if not actually weak, certainly not as strong as the first part of the novel. Helen begins to fall for a man who has had many affairs and who considers himself not immoral but amoral, but Helen's character is so well-formed it is difficult for the reader to believe she is serious about him. The last few pages on the other hand, in which there is a catastrophy that shakes Helen to the core, is very well-written and I found it realistic and very bittersweet.

Helen is hard to find and expensive but I believe it's important. Because it is so very auto-biographical it strongly suggests Georgette Heyer's character and explains her relationship with her beloved father.

On the first Earth Day in 1970 I was at a teach-in in Morristown, New Jersey, covering the story for the newspaper I worked for, the Passaic Herald News. I was bored and I was convinced despite the speakers' optimistic predictions that this was going to be an annual event and grow into a national movement that they were wrong.

Turns out it was I who was wrong and more than 30 years later EarthDay is still going strong, has in fact has become a kind of secular holy day, celebrated in various ways around the world in a sort of nature worship.

Every Sunday the Library of America, the people who are publishing definitive editions of so many US authors, sends me an email, The Story of the Week. Most are fiction and mostly I ignore them. But today, in celebration of Earth Day, they have sent me a story by the famed New Yorker columnist, Berton Roueche, author of "The Annals of Medicine." His pieces have become the plots of many House episodes.

Today they sent me "The Fog," a story published in the New Yorker in 1950 about deadly pollution in 1948 in Donora, Pennsylvania. Here's now it starts:

The fog closed over Donora on the morning of Tuesday, October 26th. The weather was raw, cloudy, and dead calm, and it stayed that way as the fog piled up all that day and the next. By Thursday, it had stiffened adhesively into a motionless clot of smoke. That afternoon, it was just possible to see across the street, and, except for the stacks, the mills had vanished. The air began to have a sickening smell, almost a taste. It was the bittersweet reek of sulphur dioxide. Everyone who was out that day remarked on it, but no one was much concerned. The smell of sulphur dioxide, a scratchy gas given off by burning coal and melting ore, is a normal concomitant of any durable fog in Donora. This time, it merely seemed more penetrating than usual.

At about eight-thirty on Friday morning, one of Donora’s eight physicians, Dr. Ralph W. Koehler, a tense, stocky man of forty-eight, stepped to his bathroom window for a look at the weather. It was, at best, unchanged. He could see nothing but a watery waste of rooftops islanded in fog. As he was turning away, a shimmer of movement in the distance caught his eye. . . .

You can read the entire story here. It comes from the Library of America anthology, American Earth.

As I read China in 10 Words, I wondered how Yu Hua managed to stay out of trouble with the authorities in his native China. It turns out he has not entirely escaped their notice and his novel, This Life, was originally banned as is the movie made from the book.

But as I slowly read these essays and thought about them I realized the criticism of the Chinese government and the description of the nation''s almost total lack of what we would call ethics in many aspects of life is secondary. The book is really about people, in this case Chinese people, engaging in what looks like Capitalism but is more like a wild west shootout in the globalized manufacturing world. "Copycat" is an attempt to explain the Chinese reaction to foreign copyright and patents (worthless) and "Bamboozle" describes the apparently universal need to lie, cheat, and steal as a sort of national game.

Many famous high-end companies manufacturer their clothing and purses and such in China. The Chinese produce many more than the company requires and sell them at much lower prices as "the real thing." Who is to say that an item manufactured in the same facility by the same people using the same patterns and materials is not "real." Copyright is another significant problem. There are 11 more Harry Potter books for sale in China than there are in Britain.

Throughout the essays Yu weaves his life as a child of the Cultural Revolution and his observations not just about the country's economy but what might be called the sociology of a fast-changing country with its poverty and opression mixed in with the recent hyper-economy. He points out that the Communists tried to wipe out the historic religions and have replaced them with nothing that would guide people in their search for ideals and guides for their lives.

The more I learn about Georgette Heyer the more interesting she becomes. Jennifer Kloester's new biography is filled with anecdotes and quote from her many letters over the years to friends, family members, and her long-suffering editors and agents. She was as witty and amusing in her letters as she is in her books.

Born in 1902, Heyer was the daughter of a well-educated man with progressive ideas about education. He taught her at home and sent her for a time to school and between these two she got a really fine education in history and languages. He was a French teacher at King's College School until the school asked him to do some fund raising for them. He was very successful at this and met a great many people of importance, some of whom he introudced to Georgette. She had an unusual childhood and an unusually tight link with her father.

Her father's job took him to France and the family lived in Paris in 1913. They left quickly when the war broke out in 1914, but while she was there Georgette had the time of her life. In one of her early books set in the 20th century she describes a trip to the city and the joy her character, based closedly on Georgette herself, took in walking everywhere, driving to Fontainbleu or Versailles, and deciding which of the boulevards radiating from the Place d'Etoile gave the best view of the Art de Triumph.

The Black Moth was Georgette Heyer's first historical romance, written to amuse her brother, Boris, when he was ill. She was only 19 when the book was published and it was such a hit she immediately began writing at least one novel a year for most of the rest of her life. Her books were not just Regency romances, although those are the ones that she is most famous for. She also wrote a series of murder mysteries, four books set in the 20th century that she later repressed, probably because they were too revealing for this very reserved and somewhat shy woman. She also wrote about the medieval period and the Georgian as well as the years 1811-1820.

Jennifer Kloester was fortunate in having available to her not only the notes from Jane Aiken Hodge's earlier biography but many letters from the collections of family and friends and the cooperation of Heyer's son and his wife. Her doctoral dissertation was eventually turned into her book, Georgette Heyer's Regency World. The author is interviewed here and here on the Word Wenches blog. Elaine at Random Jottings, who has met the author, posted about this book here.

Jewels by Victoria Finlay seemed like the perfect book for my friend Isabella's birthday so I ordered it from Amazon. When it came on a Wednesday afternoon I sat down to look at the photos. By Saturday morningI had finished reading it. I didn't mean to do it. I couldn't help myself.

Gemstones engage us on a few different levels. They are pretty to look at of course, and there is something attractive about their rarity (although some of them aren't that rare, as it turns out.) And over the years, since history began, stories have accrued around them, growing like an emerald crystal.

Finlay, the author of Colour: Travels through the Paintbox, which dovegreyreader has been reading, has put a great deal of research and travel into this book about gems and it has paid off. She has spent hours in museums and bazaars, crawled into ancient Egyptian and still operating mines, talked to people from a Scottish pearl fisher to a retired diamond cutter, and interviewed a man whose father devised a way to create man-made jewel-quality emeralds. Synthetic diamonds (including those made from a loved one's ashes if you are interested) and rubies are now quite large and almost impossible to tell from the real thing.

The organization of the book is clever. Finlay uses the Moh scale of hardness (talc to diamond) to arrange her chapters, starting with amber, which is very soft and light (it floats.) She has some bad news for us there. The famous amber room was taken by the Germans from St Petersburg during World War Two and was almost surely burned (and melted) at the end of the war.

Next comes one of my favorite chapters, about Whitby jet. It is this small English town from which came the jet jewelry so popular with Queen Victoria and the rest of mourning-obsessed 19th century English ladies. Finlay attends an underground church in the opal mining town Coober Pedy where there is an entire city underground. She visits the American Indian reservation where most of the world's periots are found.

Her trip to Burma to learn about rubies includes an overview of the violent military dictatorship there and her visit to Sri Lanka (Marco Polo got their first) to look for the origins of her family's sapphire are amusing and intriguing. She got to try her hand at cutting a "sapphire" (actually quartz.)

Finlay talks about pearls but that chapter was not as complete as the others (or perhaps I just know too much about pearls) and I got a bit tired with her repeated cries of anguish for the poor oysters who suffer from having small beads embedded in their gonads in pearl farms. She discusses blood diamonds (now called by jewelers, less-alarmingly, conflict diamonds) and the death and misery they have brought to people in many of the African countries where diamonds are mined. She puzzles at the continued popularity of diamonds despite this injustice and the fact that the stones are not rare but rather are made to seem rare because they are controlled by the De Beers cartel.

The book sent me scurrying to look up images on Google of sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and the collection of jewels in the Topkapi Museum (there is a jeweled dagger with some whopping great emeralds in the handle that I rather fancy.) I can't wait to find out what Finlay will be writing about next.

I've always loved the stage direction from A Winter's Tale,"Exit, pursued by a bear," even though the character exiting under duress does get eaten by his pursuer. But one of the many grisly entrances and exits in Titus Andronicus has become my new favorite: Enter carrying two heads and a hand.

I asked Wilhelm what he knew about Titus Andronicus and all he could think of was, "Seldom performed." I can see why. The bloodshed is almost unending and includes the cutting off of both hands and cutting out the tongue of Titus' daughter. Not to mention all the deaths.

Titus is not a historical character. He is a fictitious general who arrives back in Rome after a 10-year war and a great victory in which 21 of his sons were killed, leaving I think three alive. He brings, as conquering heroes did in those days, the captive Gothic queen, Tamora, and her son, Alarbus. Also her lover, Aaron, though I don't suppose that is as traditional.

The Roman emperor has died. We don't know which one and since this is all fiction it doesn't matter. But what does matter is who will succeed him. The crowd wants Titus but the old man says no and asks them instead to let him choose the next ruler. He chooses the bad guy, the elder son, Saturninus (he should have known better just by the guy's name.) The new emperor asks Titus for his daughter, Lavinia, in marriage and Titus says yes, not realizing she is already engaged to be married to the brother of Saturninus, Bassianus, the one he should have chosen to rule Rome (except that if he had there would be no play.)

Titus' remaining sons help her fiance run off with her and the new emperor gets mad and marries the Gothic queen instead. And then the fun begins.

Here's an casualty list:

the dead bodyof one of Tisus' sons,

the sacrifice of Tamora's son,

the stabbing of Mutius by his father, Titus

the stabbing of Bassianus by Tamor's sons

the rape and mutilation of Lavinia

the mutilation of Titus

the execution of Martius and

Quintus,

the stabbling of a nurse

the hanging of a clown

the throat-cutting of Chiron and

Demetrius

the unwitting cannivalism of Tamora

the stabbing of Lavinia

the stabbing of Tamora

the stabbing of Titus

the stabbing of Saturninus, and finally

the projected death by slow starvation of Aaron.

I can't recommend this play to anyone except perhaps a student of Senecan tragedy, of which it is a parody I think. I've been under the mistaken assumption that I had read all of Shakespeare but I had not read this and now I know why.

Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris by David King is a gruesome story of a man who took advantage of people who wanted or needed to get out of Paris during World War Two. Here is what PW said about the book:

In 1944, when Parisian police entered a mansion littered with dismembered, rotting bodies, they thought of the Gestapo, but it turned out to be a purely French affair. Historian King (Vienna 1914) has mined the resulting global media circus (not only in France; Time magazine covered it) and extensive official records to tell a gripping story. The villain was a textbook psychopath, Dr. Marcel Petiot: a charming but heartless liar. Despite spending 20 years in and out of police courts, he won elections to local offices in the provinces only to be dismissed for petty crimes. Moving to Paris, he sold narcotics to addicts under the guise of treatment. During the German occupation, he offered to smuggle people out of France, murdering them when they arrived for the journey carrying their valuables. He went to the guillotine proclaiming himself (despite overwhelming evidence) a resistance hero, who killed only Nazis and collaborators. This fascinating, often painful account combines a police procedural with a vivid historical portrait of culture and law enforcement in Nazi-occupied France.

One of the interesting characters in this book is the policeman who investigated the serial murders, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu. He was charged at the end of the war as so many innocent people were with collaboration but after a short time was totally exonerated. He is believed to be one of the originals for Georges Simenon's Maigret.